Android Market is a mess

An interesting piece by tech wizard Jon Lech Johansen critizing Google's management of the Android Market.

Google does far too little curation of the Android Market, and it shows. Unlike Apple's App Store, the Android Market has few high quality apps.

It gets worse:

Below are just a few examples of what's wrong with the Android Market. Those 144 spam ringtone apps (which are clearly infringing copyright) are currently cluttering the top ranks of the Multimedia category. I was not surprised to find that they were being monetized through Google Ads.

Google is also allowing users to get access to apps that allow them to download music illegally:

Trademark and copyright infringement is widespread in the Android Market:

The music downloading app "Tunee" (one of many such apps) is one of the Top Free apps in the Multimedia category with more than 250k downloads. While some would dishonestly try to pretend that such apps are meant for downloading public domain classical music, the developers of Tunee are very clear about their intent.

So basically, on the one hand Apple offers a tightly controlled marketplace where users can find apps, while Google has created a wild west where anything goes. Which is best?

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This is the clearest indication yet that Google's Android platform (and I mean the platform as a whole, not the OS specifically) is far from ready for prime time. How is the end user supposed to filter through the apps to find legitimate ones in the midst of all the junk? Where's the element of trust? Where's the oversight?

There's a valuable lesson here for Microsoft to learn with it's mobile aspirations - set the development bar too low and invite anyone and everyone on board to create anything, and what you end up with is a cesspool where high-quality apps don't have a chance of flourishing.

Google - FIX IT!!!!